Sandy Hook tremors will go on

Published 9:44 pm, Friday, December 20, 2013

The reverberations of the Sandy Hook Elementary School shootings will be felt for a long time in this state, which a year after the murders, is still starved for major facts.

We're still grappling with the implications of victim privacy, the self-importance of elected officials and the people's right to know.

One of the little-known chapters in the massive statewide response to the Newtown massacre was the role of the Environmental Conservation Police unit of the state Department of Energy and Environmental Protection, which usually enforces hunting and fishing laws and regulations.

EnCon Police are certified as police officers by the Connecticut Police Officer Standards and Training Council. They also get specialized training. They're armed and deputized by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and the National Marine Fisheries Service. There are three districts: the Marine district along the coast and east and west sides of the state. In the summer, the 48-member unit patrol state parks for public safety and waterways for boating rules and drunken sailors.

This time of year they're in the state parks on snowmobile and ATV enforcement patrols. Last week EnCon Police assisted State Police on a search warrant up in Litchfield that resulted in the seizure of an exotic species of snake.

It was a tragedy of a different kind that first brought the extra EnCon officers to the Newtown region that Friday morning.

They were at the organization's Southwest sector field office in Osbornedale State Park in Derby as part of an investigation into a fatal boating accident downstream in Shelton, on the Housatonic River. A group of fishermen out on the river in a small boat during the evening had hit an underwater obstacle. One fisherman fell out and drowned.

Col. Kyle Overturf, who heads the unit, recalled recently that when the State Police began talking about the shooting over their radios, two EnCon Police monitoring the frequency raced up Route 34, along the Housatonic, up over the Stevenson Dam, through Monroe and under Interstate-84 into Sandy Hook.

In all, 10 EnCon Police responded to the massacre, assisting in the evacuation of the school and securing the perimeter, even detaining a pesky pair of reporters from a New York newspaper who were trying to sneak onto the property through the woods at the end of Crestwood Drive.

"They came up from behind," Overturf, underplaying the potential drama, said in a recent interview. "At that time the information we had said there could be another shooter."

Adam Lanza's murder of his mother, 20 first-graders and six adults in the school was a mysterious event almost beyond understanding. It was also one that affected many more than the families of the victims. The circles widen to include the town, the Newtown region, across Connecticut and through the country.

It's not just the families' tragedy, but everyone's. They have the most grief to live through, but it's on all of us as the calendar pages mount up.

It should be the civic duty of everyone to carry the memories of the slaughter at Sandy Hook, so we can try to prevent future occurrences that are happening way too frequently.

Part of the civic responsibility is making sure the flow of public information continues unabated.

Lawmakers in the General Assembly, on the last day of the legislative session in June and under pressure from Sandy Hook families, approved suppressing homicide-victim photos. They also voted to shield radio recordings of police responders until at least next May.

Danbury State's Attorney Stephen Sedensky III had already dropped the hammer and held on to the emergency 911 recordings for a full year, until a Superior Court judge scolded him and ordered him to release them.

Now we have a task force heavy on state agency lawyers and lawmakers working the end game on the balance between the public's right to know and victims' rights of privacy as we head into the 2014 legislative session and subsequent election season.

One of the task force members in favor of less public information is Rep. DebraLee Hovey, R-Monroe, whose 22,990-member district includes a small sliver -- 3,511 people -- of Newtown.

"None of those people in my district, or in my communities, which is 40,000 people, chose to be in the situation that they're in," she said Oct. 30. "Neither have I chosen to be representing, kind of, this issue per se," said Hovey.

"The constituency should, I would hope, when they're looking at who they're electing as officials, would be electing people who aren't just debating and discussing from some sort of arbitrary ideologue (sic) and that constituency should know and feel that we are representing them and their perspectives and that we do know and are out and about in our communities, so that we do know what the tenor of those communities are and that we are representing those. And so I personally have not been one who's been terribly concerned about taking positions that are going to enamor me for the next election season. You either love that about me or you don't. And so I just wanted to clarify that for the public. I sit here representing 40,000 people who are in the position that they never ever dreamed they would be."

The task force finally agreed to leave alone the rules on the release of 911 recordings when they make their eventual recommendations to the General Assembly.